Strategic capability architecture: The role of network capability

A firm's network capability refers to its ability to build, handle and exploit relationships. These capabilities are interwoven in a complex configuration with the other capabilities and competencies of the firm and in practice, are very difficult to separate from them. Rather than assuming that firms inherently possess network capability, our aim is to discover if the shared managerial logic of top management teams confirms its presence. In order to understand how managers perceive, process and interpret network capability, we guided the management teams of five industrial suppliers through a novel five-step process of introducing, identifying, critically screening, challenging and verifying the capabilities of the firm. The paper introduces a framework for strategic capability architecture and investigates how network capability emerges from among the configuration of other capabilities in industrial firms. We found that network capabilities are central to the formation of customer capabilities. Network capabilities also play an important role as assets contributing to the formation of other capability sets. Furthermore, we found that the networking capabilities act in unison with other capabilities through three different strategic logics termed partnering, value streaming, and horizontal allying.     

Vested interests, population ageing and technology adoption

Technologies that are used differ vastly across and within countries. It is commonly observed that technologies that would improve productivity are not adopted. This paper explains the failure to adopt new technologies through costs of adoption for people of different age. We set out an overlapping generations model with majority voting that predicts a relationship between the age composition of an economy and economic growth. We also consider the effects of more intense competition on technology adoption.     

The Value of Personal Contact in Marketing Insurance: Client Judgments of Representativeness and Mental Availability

Much previous research in decision analyses has focused on the processes of simplification that the decision maker applies in order to obtain a reduced set of alternatives. In the present work, we show how the principles of judgment by representativeness and mental availability can be applied to insurance decisions. We extend this view by considering interaction between these two heuristics and by analyzing the effect of the longer time horizon typical for insurance problems. The results of such simplification are shown to be inherently unstable. Nevertheless, it is possible to explain on the basis of our analysis why certain marketing practices dominate insurance markets.     

The GDPs of seven major regions, 1950–1990

Using international comparison data for 1950–1990, we describe the GDPs of seven major regions of the non-Communist world: the North, the South (“down under”), Tropical Africa, Tropical America, and South-West, South-Central and South-East Asia. The inequality among these regions accounts for almost 90 percent of the inequality among the 113 individual countries.     

The effect of the shape of the income distribution on two inequality measures

This letter describes the effect of skewness and kurtosis of the log-income distribution on two measures of income inequality. Positive skewness and leptokurtosis affect inequality positively.     

A generalization of working's model

Working's (1943) model states that budget shares are linear functions of the logarithm of income; it implies constant differences between corresponding marginal and budget shares. A one-parameter generalization is proposed which allows each marginal share to be a linear function of the corresponding budget share. This model can be further extended (with one extra parameter) so that all goods are either specific substitutes or specific complements.     

Measuring the quality of the consumer's basket

Summary This article describes an approach to the measurement of the change in the quality of the consumer's basket, based on shifts in the basket composition toward and away from luxury goods and necessities. One of the results is that the income elasticity of the demand for quality appears to be equal to a weighted variance of the income elasticities of the individual goods and services. The discussion includes an application to the annual changes in the Dutch consumer's basket from 1922 to 1963 as well as an analysis of the decomposition of quality change between and within commodity groups.Research supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant GS-30084.     

A simple method of estimating price elasticities in international trade

The differential production theory approach is applied to world trade matrices of 1971 and 1975, which yields a price elasticity estimate of the demand for foreign food of about ?0.7. The elasticity estimates for raw material and manufactures are both between ?0.3 and ?0.4.     

A META‐ANALYSIS ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INCOME INEQUALITY AND ECONOMIC GROWTH

In recent years there is a growing interest in determining the impact of inequality on economic growth. Theoretical papers as well as empirical applications have, however, produced controversial results. Although there is a considerable part of the literature that considers inequality detrimental to growth, more recent studies have challenged this result and found a positive effect of inequality on growth. In this paper, we provide a contribution to the empirical puzzle by using meta‐analysis to systematically describe, identify and analyse the variation in outcomes of empirical studies. We find that estimation methods, data quality and sample coverage systematically affect the results. The results point out that it will be particularly useful to increasingly focus research on determining the impact of income inequality on economic growth using single‐country data at the regional level, or a relatively homogeneous set of countries with adequate controls for country‐wide differences in economic, social and institutional characteristics.